prayer

So many times God has taught me things by using me to teach them to others. Have you ever found yourself giving someone advice that you didn't actually know before it came out of your mouth?

I found myself talking about struggling through prayer with God. How Abraham literally fought with God over the destruction of an entire city and GOD CHANGED HIS MIND. More than once. The Bible says, "you have not because you ask not." Not, "you have not because you don't ask the right way." God knows what you feel, when you heart is breaking and when you don't understand. I don't know all of the details, but I know that there are things that God can't/won't do because he can find no one to be the intercessor. If you don't pray because you are afraid your prayer is selfish, you could be missing something huge. God will use the very prayer you are praying for that thing to be done to prepare you and allow you to trust him when it doesn't happen. How can you believe that God has sovereign judgment when you have never wrestled with it enough to give it completely over to his control? When you know in your heart that you've fought hard enough and pleaded long enough and poured your heart out enough that God knows and hears you, you'll be able to trust that what he ends up doing was for the best. Believe that God's heart is moved by his children's pleas. When you know that God has heard you, it will be easier to have peace that what happens in your life WILL turn out for the best. That your will is not best. That because you struggled so hard, God MUST have a more sovereign plan or surely he would have given you what you requested.

Prayer is patient and demanding, humble and confident, pleading and begging and stating fact and stating opinion. Feeling and passion. Confusion and enlightenment and pain and heartbreak and comfort and rest. Release and burden. Hurt and healing. Questions and answers and more questions. But above all, learning to communicate ALL of that to a God who wants to hear it. Who created you to fight with him. Who created you to change things with him, not just narrate them to him.

How disappointed must God be when we, his bride and his passion, pray as though he can't or won't move when we ask him?